*spoilers*
Reminds me a bit of Nuclei, which is good. The scene with all the robots who all decline to help the protagonist in his quest to find the meaning of what this heart-shaped object is, and what it could bring forth was awesome. Really nice camerawork there with the tilted angles. The endscene with the female robot was really emotional, good job!

Stands out due to the distinctive modelling, and the amount of it. Some general issues: what's up with the "motion blur"? Looks kind of cheap. Secondly most of the content looks "underexposed" by even as much as two stops at times. Looks a lot like a pyrotech demo (especially the latest one), but comes together a whole lot better in this case. Synth was great, lovely oscillators and instruments, music was... not great but very good still, my problem being that it built up towards some sort of climax the whole time which in the end never arrived. Great job in any case, good to see this genre of intros still being held up.

Lovedit - I was rooting for the little guy as the demo went on, great visuals, I think its been mentioned here, there were some issues with blurring in parts (did not look right) - but the shear amount of content you have here and the quality of it in 64K is mighty impressive! One I will watch again!

Music was drab and camera work boring, and no I'm not over the top about the story either but a technical thumb for fitting the story in 64k :) And for some reason it had that flavor of quirky French demos that I always like!

Weak thumb for the amount of graphics, scenes and storytelling.
I totally dislike the rendering (blurred everywhere, kind of noise textures that look glitch), and it ran super slow on my machine (i7@4.5 + GTX 970), had to drop the resolution to 1280x720 for it to stop stuttering.

My suggestion: Make a version 1.1 with shorter/smoother transitions and without all that blur/post processing :)

Fix for the motion blur is coming in the final. There wasn't enough time to fix it for the party version since we were already late and almost missed the deadline so we had to remove proper anti-aliasing techniques and rely on crude temporal anti-aliasing to make it in time.

It was too dark on the bigscreen, and yeah too much blur, but if this gets fixed it will be awesome - I love it!

I'd have some minor complaints about direction and pace, like the scene where the robot runs away from the "tendrils" is too long/too static. But that doesn't detract from the fact that this demo looks gorgeous and emotionally sucked me in. Best of compo for me!

This was just amazing. Just in the first scene I thought that it had a very polished look and style. But then scene after scene follows seemingly without an end. Each and every one with amazing textures, lighting and geometry. And It even does have a gorgeous and very well told story. This really raises the bar for 64k. Wow! Great Job!

it comes through as a noble attempt to create a compressed story with high-end graphics. I salute this idea, as it migth possible reach a wider audience than regular intros. That said, i would highly encourage you to reseach storytelling and direction as these points completely destroyed this intro. Simply said, it got weird and tacky imho. I do however see a good amount of work and potential here, please continue to reach for it.

while i'm not really a fan of storydemos i do appreaciate the massive amount of work spent on the modelling/texturing/animation.
music was ok but it sounded to me like you had to make a tradeoff there for the gfx.

The sheer amount of work in producing content for this intro is massive and the renderer is up there but the direction is a bit lacking for me. It just feels a bit rushed, but hey.. it was developed right up to the deadline with lack of sleep so I am not surprised ;) <3 <3 <3 One heart for each of you...

I loved this in every way, but I feel a bit sorry about how much it tried to grab and how much slipped away because of it. There's definite greatness here but prolly would've needed a month more work (to what is already an absurd amount of work invested by the looks) to be amazing.

Massive respect and love for you guys. I'm much too scared of the "short movie as a demo" thing to even try something like this. The amount and quality of procedural content you made is just too insane anyway. The character animation (which is a difficult thing to do even with infinite filesize and a legion of artists) broke immersion for me a few times, which is why I'm really really looking forward to the final version :D

Absolutely amazing job! and don't let polishing the final distract you from working on the next installment please :)

there are many things that are not perfect here - it aimed for the stars and "only" reached the upper atmosphere - but the amount and quality of work involved is just ridiculous. someone could spend a year doing this as a movie, let alone a 64k. i thought the concept/story was touching and it worked.

Haha, same here, my two daughters loved it as well. :-D Actually their favorite demo so far is the "one with the strawberries" (Gaia Machina), so Approximate hereby gets my official "Recommended for Kids" certificate!

Your style is quite recognizable. Making a demo with this kind of story deserves respect, since it requires a ton of work and it's so easy to make it wrong.

You took a very interesting approach. The story has some action and suspense in it, but the direction tries to remove it all: very slow pace, long shots, slow-cutting, lots of fade in/fade out, uneventful soundtrack. Everything tells us the robot is alone and is doomed to fail. And this is very touching.

Without a doubt, this is my personal winner. I'm fine with having only a demo every 3 years if it has this quality!

big thumb up for this amazing short movie. really awesome to see someone not only showing great visuals but also pushing story driven intros. for the final, even if you remove the extreme TAA try to keep the dreamy look, for me it is really important for the general impression.
great thank you for your productions and see you next year at the party :)

Extremely good looking and impressive amount of details. You can really see that you guys must have put an incredible amount of work into this. I also liked the music and in my opinion it fitted the visuals and the story nicely. The story was very well executed, but it felt a bit corny to me. Overall amazing work and I'm really looking forward to the final and also your next production!

As others mentioned here plenty of things were less than perfect but it was definitely very charming. Oddly enough the motion blur gave the intro a nostalgic feel for me, like I was watching a cross between "Machines of Madness" and "Fulcrum", I guess :)

Anyway, for sheer ambition and scale this ranks among one of the best intros released ever.

The amount of work that has gone into this is incredible. I agree the story is cliche but then again so are most holywood movies. The fact this story is told so well in realtime animation in 64k is what blows my mind.

How did I not comment this yet? o.O My personal compowinner, nay, partywinner, despite an overall massive compo. The amount of content in here is just ridiculous and the story is admittedly cheesy, but touching and really well told.
The camera work and pacing fits the dark mood; I loved how the three rooms with the different robots light up one after the other, like in an old automatic puppet theater.
I can barely wait for the final, and I'm looking forward to seeing you guys and your next prod again at Revision ;)